Salim Green

Salim Green explores themes of concealment, visibility, and opacity through a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, sculpture, video, performance, installation, sound, and writing. For Green, abstraction functions both as an aesthetic strategy and an attitude: a means of negotiating notions of legibility, authorship, and the plasticity of experience. A recurring point of reference in his work is “Dark Forest Theory”—a speculative framework proposing that extraterrestrial civilizations remain hidden to avoid detection and destruction. Adopting this theory as a lens for understanding relational dynamics and Black existence, Green’s work embodies acts of strategic withdrawal—resistant assertions of unknowability, interiority, and survival. Salim Green has recently had a solo exhibition at SculptureCenter, New York and currently is the Sullivan Fellow in the arts at Wesleyan University. Salim Green (b. 1996, Middletown, CT) earned a BA from Wesleyan University in 2020 and an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles in 2024. Green’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Room 3557, Los Angeles; Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Middletown; SculptureCenter, New York; Bellyman, Los Angeles; Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; Fábrica, Mexico City. His work is included in the collections of the Getty Research Institute, The Kinsey Collection and the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. He lives and works in New York.